Peeling the Onion
Vanessa Ross
I lived in Memphis from age one to twenty-five, minus a little over a year in Latin America and a few months in Chicago. As a younger person I felt like Memphis had its priorities all wrong: too much focus on appearances and religion, a definite dislike for those who rock the boat. I knew that not everyone was like this, but conservatism permeated the very air we breathed, so figuring out who I was wasn't easy. I was ready to leave before I graduated high school, but stayed for a scholarship to Rhodes. I finally left for good to go to midwifery school in San Francisco, lived for over 8 years in Northern California, and have now lived for a year in Northampton, Mass., a lovely, progressive college town. I try never to say never, but if I have my way, I’ll never live in Memphis again. So I took this writing assignment in stride, thinking it would be easy to explain why. But I found myself ruminating on the question for weeks, and I realized that my connection with the place in which I was raised is anything but simple. Too many layers of relationships and memories and feelings temper the lens through which I view this place. So I started peeling the onion.
The outermost, papery skin rips off easily, the seemingly small, but not insignificant things, like how I don’t like the layout of the city and how much driving one has to do there; or that I can’t stand being from, much less living in, the same place as Elvis (since he isn’t really dead). And the heat: the sweltering, elongated, one hundred percent humidity summers, requiring ridiculous amounts of energy to be spent on “conditioning” the inside air in most public places down to temperatures suitable for a meat locker. The irony of having to carry a sweater around in the summer to avoid freezing inside one’s workplace or whilst shopping, knowing that all this “cooling” is simply resulting in more global warming is another reason I don’t live in Memphis.
Then there’s the high crime rate that results from centuries of racial and socioeconomic oppression. The last place I lived in Memphis was on the edge of “Sherwood Forest,” off of South Highland. I got tired of being afraid if I had to drive home late at night alone or even if I wanted to walk two blocks to Walgreen’s in broad daylight. And these fears were not the unfounded imaginings of a skinny white girl: over approximately 4 years time and in various Midtown and Downtown locations, I was mugged at gunpoint, had my apartment robbed (luckily I wasn’t home), and my car was broken into three times—once while I was marching in a Martin Luther King Day parade. I was surprised to learn in San Francisco, a much more densely populated city with a huge homeless population, what it means to live in a safer environment; I never got ripped off once there, and now I live in a town where most people don’t lock their doors.
Deeper in I come to the cultural piece. Southern culture is extremely rich in many ways: music, literature, food, even the old “hospitality” still holds its charm for me. But beneath the surface, the South is still plagued with a culture of judgment and denial. In my own family, ignoring or hiding problems like rape, teen pregnancy, alcoholism, mental illness, and homosexuality was preferable to facing them, and still is. Of course religion informs this tendency to a large extent. Memphis might as well be the buckle on the Bible Belt; it is full of those whose religion gives them the right to sit in the judge’s chair. “God’s country,” as my grandfather calls it, is only a safe place to be if you are amongst the godly.
In the South I find magnified the things about this great country of ours that I have a hard time tolerating: consumerism, commercialized Christian holidays, artery-clogging food, guns in over half of our households, a frightening degree of ignorance about life outside the U.S., and an even eerier pride in that insularism. Most of the time I just want to turn-tail and run off to Europe, where they are older and wiser; or Canada, where I guess they are just smarter; or Bhutan, where they are the happiest of all despite (or perhaps because) they don’t have all the technology we do. But so far I stay here because I think how much worse our nation could be, how much more environmental and political destruction Americans would inflict on the rest of the planet, if everyone with a conscience and a brain abandoned ship.
Perhaps I should feel the same way about the South: I grew up there, and I should stay there in solidarity with the strong minority of progressive Southerners who are changing things, among whom I count numerous friends and relations. I don’t feel this affiliation with the South, because the truth is, the South doesn’t want me. I am a married lesbian with a child, and the Southern states have made it clear through their laws and constitutional amendments that my family is not welcome there. I’m sure if I loved the South with all my heart, I would stay and fight to change this situation. But I don’t, and I have other causes I’d rather devote my energy to.
Most importantly, beneath all these layers of reasons why not is the fact that Memphis doesn’t have what I do want. I want to live in a place where I am surrounded by woods and mountains and rivers; where my family is a welcomed part of the community; where people are serious about taking care of the land and fighting for political justice here and everywhere. I want to live in an environment where I can thrive and where my wife and son can thrive too; where Miles is allowed to be himself and never feel afraid or ashamed to find out who he is, not only because we support him in doing that but because our community does. And I think I do.
Showing posts with label Vanessa Ross. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vanessa Ross. Show all posts
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Monday, April 11, 2005
Miles of Love
Miles of Love
Vanessa Ross
When I was younger, I never thought much about having children. I assumed I would do so one day, in the usual fashion. It never occurred to me that I would have what is now called an “alternative family”, probably because the only types of families I knew were the married and divorced parents varieties (mine being the latter). The first time I encountered a family with same-sex parents was in the Quaker meeting I attended in Memphis in my early 20s. In that oasis of acceptance in the midst of the conservative Memphis desert, their family was treated no differently than the others. Yet I remember remarking to my then-husband that while I liked this family and thought the women were great parents, the situation felt unnatural to me; I couldn’t get around that fact the “natural” way babies come into the world is via the union of a man and a woman. While true in a sense, my attitude at the time now seems to me a bit of internalized homophobia, something most lesbians and gays deal with and often recognize in our pre-coming-out mentalities. When I came out a few years later, one of the deepest realizations I had was that for me, being with women came much more naturally than being with men, and aligning my life with that fact created a sense of “rightness” I’d never experienced as a straight woman.
Living in San Francisco and getting to know more “alternative” families made the idea of same-sex parenting less and less strange to me. When I met and fell in love with my wife Liz, it became even clearer to me that regardless of their sexes, when two people love each other and want to spend their lives together, expanding that love by having children is the most natural thing in the world. The first night we met, we talked about babies, never daring to imagine we’d have one together. I am a midwife, and Liz was baby-crazy at the time, so of course it came up. As our relationship grew and developed, and we made a commitment to each other, having children was always something we intended to do. I knew that I wanted to conceive and bear a child myself; Liz was unsure if she did and was also interested in adopting someday. Nearly three years later, with neither of us getting any younger, we decided I would get pregnant first, and then we would decide about how to have the second one later.
We both felt strongly that we wanted to conceive using a known donor, as we assumed our child(ren) one day would want to know who their biological father was. While it sounded easier in a way to select sperm from an anonymous donor through a sperm bank and never have to worry about our children “belonging” to anyone but us, we suspected that like most adopted children, our children might feel a need to see and know the person from whom their other half came. We did not want to deny our future children this knowledge, and so we considered our options.
Our first choice was a common one among lesbians: the brother of the nonbio. mom; in our case, Liz’s brother Dan. Initially Dan was very moved by the idea and agreed to the proposal. However, upon meeting some resistance from Liz’s mother and reconsidering his comfort level with this unorthodox family structure (i.e., being the child’s bio. father and uncle; Liz being the child’s mother and bio. aunt), he changed his mind. Liz and I were of course very disappointed. We had loved the idea of our child being biologically connected to both of us and the potential of seeing a resemblance to both of us in our child. But we also appreciated Dan’s honesty and the seriousness with which he approached the matter. Mutual biological connection was not as important to us as finding the right situation and relationship for us as parents with our donor.
Each of us had a male friend in our lives who we considered as potential donors, but neither felt like great choices for different reasons. We started perusing a few sperm banks online that had donors who agreed to reveal their identities after the child was born, but that felt a little dicey to us as well. We wanted our kids to know who their biological father was, but we also felt it important that he be someone we would want to know. Selecting sperm online did not seem to meet our need to ensure we would like the donor himself and feel good about our children potentially having some kind of relationship with him one day.
One day, my good friend Stacey called us up and on behalf of her husband Warren, offered us his sperm. I was blown away. All of my friends were very engaged in creating their own families, and I never considered asking any of them for their husbands’ sperm. Warren and I were not extremely close, but I knew him to be a kind, intelligent, incredibly creative, and politically aware guy, the type of man we would want our children to know. He is also not bad looking and in good health, and I knew who he’d been sleeping with, so we didn’t have to worry about STDs. After several conversations between Liz and me and Warren and Stacey, as well as other friends from whom we solicited advice, Liz and I decided that it felt right. We knew that we would always want our families to be connected anyway, and Warren being our donor would make us extended family in a more official way. We also felt that no matter what challenges this new relatedness might bring, we would be able to communicate with one another and negotiate uncharted terrain as we came to it.
Almost a year later, we were ready. After researching our options for insemination, we opted for the long-distance DIY method. This plan entailed Warren sending us his sperm sample mixed with a nutritive medium that would keep it alive during its cross-country FedEx journey to us, courtesy of “Overnight Male”, the kit developed by the University of Illinois just for that purpose. The trick was that we then had to separate the sperm from the medium before inseminating, which required a rinsing and spinning procedure in a centrifuge generally only found in fertility clinics and sperm banks. Luckily, however, my research had brought me in contact with Leland, the director of the Rainbow Flag Sperm Bank, who upon hearing that I was a nurse midwife/nurse practitioner said, “Oh you can do this yourself; it’s not rocket science!” He agreed to teach me the whole process and sent me to the website of the medical supply company, where for the price of one round of insemination, I could purchase my very own variable speed centrifuge. Even better, I found a barely used one on Ebay for almost half that price, and Leland sold me most of the other necessary supplies.
Because of the concentrated nature of the sample after being rinsed and spun, the acidic climate of the vagina was too perilous for these sperm to traverse, and they would need to be directly deposited in my uterus via intrauterine insemination. This procedure entailed an operator savvy with speculums and finding the cervix, and while I myself was such a provider, doing my own insemination would be a logistical nightmare, if not impossibility. As fate would have it, I had trained my partner Liz in the art of speculum exams several months prior when I had an abnormal Pap that she helped me treat naturopathically. So with a brief orientation on the new equipment and sterile technique, she was ready to roll.
All of this might seem like a lot of trouble to some people, but we wanted our technology-enabled conception to also feel intimate and loving, and we knew that could only happen in the privacy of our own home. We also assumed that we would have to make several attempts before getting pregnant and feared the cost would be astronomical if we went through the official channels. Grabbing a cross-country flight when I was ovulating also seemed impractical and expensive, so this plan was best for us.
So by January 2004 we were mentally, emotionally, physically, and logistically as prepared as one can be for conceiving a child. The Overnight Male kits had arrived in Memphis, we had discussed the probable days of ovulation based on my cycle history and schooled Stacey and Warren on when they should or shouldn’t have sex around that time in order to ensure the freshest and most plentiful sperm possible, and we had the FedEx drop-off points and schedule in hand. Now we were just waiting for that egg to pop out, as evidenced by a positive ovulation predictor test. Unfortunately, my prediction was that I would ovulate on a Sunday, the one-day FedEx did not pick-up or deliver packages, except for a small fortune. So we decided to err on the side of an early insemination, as fresh sperm can survive for up to 5 days in the uterus and tubes. After an overnight flight, we knew they wouldn’t last quite that long, but we hoped they’d last a couple of days at least until the egg arrived on the scene. Given that Stacey and Warren had gotten pregnant every time they thought about it with no planning whatsoever, we were banking on him having some super-sperm.
So we went ahead and scheduled for Thursday and Saturday inseminations, trusting that my calculations were accurate. But both days, my morning pee test came up with not-quite-fertile-yet results, indicating that my cycle was running longer than usual. Liz and I were disheartened that all our effort now seemed poorly timed, but told ourselves that it would be good practice anyway. We peeked at a drop of squirming sperm under a mini-microscope I’d bought for fertility purposes, and told the sperm we hoped they’d had a nice flight and how happy we were they survived the journey. We rinsed and spun and rinsed and spun the sperm again per the instructions, drew them up into the tiny catheter that would safely deposit them in my womb, and then had a moment of silence to center ourselves and give the little guys a moment to recover from all that spinning. We lit candles around our room, put on a Tuck and Patti CD, and shared a last look into each other’s eyes full of the enormous importance of what we were about to do.
And then my cervix wasn’t open. I mean it was shut so tight Liz could barely insert the catheter a centimeter into the external opening, another sign our timing was a bit off. Luckily, another midwife friend who does inseminations had told us that if this happened, to deposit the sperm slowly into the fertile mucus coming from the cervix so that they could swim up it into the uterus. So that’s what we did, hoping they would eek their way through.
On Monday morning my ovulation test turned positive, and we prayed that some of those little dudes would hold out for the next 24-36 hours until the egg emerged. But 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14 days later, my pregnancy tests were negative. Remember, I’m a midwife and had access to the tests at work, so I took them compulsively until the two-week mark when it should have been definitive. Then I resigned myself to not being pregnant, and Liz and I started looking at the calendar for our next attempt.
We were very disappointed, but life distracted us from being too down that weekend by throwing the San Francisco gay marriage extravaganza our way. We got married on Monday and had a one-day honeymoon on Tuesday, and were so high on our excitement about the whole thing that we had no time to be sad about not being pregnant. Back at work on Wednesday, my mind couldn’t help but go back there, what with pregnant bellies everywhere I looked. I was now on day 37 of my cycle, and still no period. I attributed this to excess scrutiny and stress around the whole thing and wondered how I would ever get pregnant this way. On several trips to the bathroom, I looked up at the pregnancy tests and resisted reaching up for one, but finally I couldn’t hold back. I told myself that I just needed to see that negative result one more time so I could let it go, and then my body would get back on track.
As I watched, the test line appeared immediately, and then nothing. I waited a couple of minutes and was about to throw the thing away when I saw a second line slowly materialize in the test window. I didn’t trust my eyes because it was so faint, but my coworker and friend Amy took one look at it and confirmed, “It’s positive!” I locked myself in the exam room and called Liz right away. She wasn’t so happy about me taking the test without her, but was thrilled to hear the news. I went home, and we did another test together so she could see the truth for herself. And there we were - married and pregnant in the same week, and in total disbelief about the whole beautiful thing.
As I sit here typing listening to my 10-week-old son Miles cooing at Liz in the other room, I am still in disbelief and wonder if it will ever end. To think that part of this amazing little boy came in a FedEx box is a little too much for even my brain to comprehend. He is such a gift, and I hope one day he understands how much love brought him into this world and how lucky he is to have not only two mommies, but fairy godparents who helped make our wish for him come true.
Vanessa Ross
When I was younger, I never thought much about having children. I assumed I would do so one day, in the usual fashion. It never occurred to me that I would have what is now called an “alternative family”, probably because the only types of families I knew were the married and divorced parents varieties (mine being the latter). The first time I encountered a family with same-sex parents was in the Quaker meeting I attended in Memphis in my early 20s. In that oasis of acceptance in the midst of the conservative Memphis desert, their family was treated no differently than the others. Yet I remember remarking to my then-husband that while I liked this family and thought the women were great parents, the situation felt unnatural to me; I couldn’t get around that fact the “natural” way babies come into the world is via the union of a man and a woman. While true in a sense, my attitude at the time now seems to me a bit of internalized homophobia, something most lesbians and gays deal with and often recognize in our pre-coming-out mentalities. When I came out a few years later, one of the deepest realizations I had was that for me, being with women came much more naturally than being with men, and aligning my life with that fact created a sense of “rightness” I’d never experienced as a straight woman.
Living in San Francisco and getting to know more “alternative” families made the idea of same-sex parenting less and less strange to me. When I met and fell in love with my wife Liz, it became even clearer to me that regardless of their sexes, when two people love each other and want to spend their lives together, expanding that love by having children is the most natural thing in the world. The first night we met, we talked about babies, never daring to imagine we’d have one together. I am a midwife, and Liz was baby-crazy at the time, so of course it came up. As our relationship grew and developed, and we made a commitment to each other, having children was always something we intended to do. I knew that I wanted to conceive and bear a child myself; Liz was unsure if she did and was also interested in adopting someday. Nearly three years later, with neither of us getting any younger, we decided I would get pregnant first, and then we would decide about how to have the second one later.
We both felt strongly that we wanted to conceive using a known donor, as we assumed our child(ren) one day would want to know who their biological father was. While it sounded easier in a way to select sperm from an anonymous donor through a sperm bank and never have to worry about our children “belonging” to anyone but us, we suspected that like most adopted children, our children might feel a need to see and know the person from whom their other half came. We did not want to deny our future children this knowledge, and so we considered our options.
Our first choice was a common one among lesbians: the brother of the nonbio. mom; in our case, Liz’s brother Dan. Initially Dan was very moved by the idea and agreed to the proposal. However, upon meeting some resistance from Liz’s mother and reconsidering his comfort level with this unorthodox family structure (i.e., being the child’s bio. father and uncle; Liz being the child’s mother and bio. aunt), he changed his mind. Liz and I were of course very disappointed. We had loved the idea of our child being biologically connected to both of us and the potential of seeing a resemblance to both of us in our child. But we also appreciated Dan’s honesty and the seriousness with which he approached the matter. Mutual biological connection was not as important to us as finding the right situation and relationship for us as parents with our donor.
Each of us had a male friend in our lives who we considered as potential donors, but neither felt like great choices for different reasons. We started perusing a few sperm banks online that had donors who agreed to reveal their identities after the child was born, but that felt a little dicey to us as well. We wanted our kids to know who their biological father was, but we also felt it important that he be someone we would want to know. Selecting sperm online did not seem to meet our need to ensure we would like the donor himself and feel good about our children potentially having some kind of relationship with him one day.
One day, my good friend Stacey called us up and on behalf of her husband Warren, offered us his sperm. I was blown away. All of my friends were very engaged in creating their own families, and I never considered asking any of them for their husbands’ sperm. Warren and I were not extremely close, but I knew him to be a kind, intelligent, incredibly creative, and politically aware guy, the type of man we would want our children to know. He is also not bad looking and in good health, and I knew who he’d been sleeping with, so we didn’t have to worry about STDs. After several conversations between Liz and me and Warren and Stacey, as well as other friends from whom we solicited advice, Liz and I decided that it felt right. We knew that we would always want our families to be connected anyway, and Warren being our donor would make us extended family in a more official way. We also felt that no matter what challenges this new relatedness might bring, we would be able to communicate with one another and negotiate uncharted terrain as we came to it.
Almost a year later, we were ready. After researching our options for insemination, we opted for the long-distance DIY method. This plan entailed Warren sending us his sperm sample mixed with a nutritive medium that would keep it alive during its cross-country FedEx journey to us, courtesy of “Overnight Male”, the kit developed by the University of Illinois just for that purpose. The trick was that we then had to separate the sperm from the medium before inseminating, which required a rinsing and spinning procedure in a centrifuge generally only found in fertility clinics and sperm banks. Luckily, however, my research had brought me in contact with Leland, the director of the Rainbow Flag Sperm Bank, who upon hearing that I was a nurse midwife/nurse practitioner said, “Oh you can do this yourself; it’s not rocket science!” He agreed to teach me the whole process and sent me to the website of the medical supply company, where for the price of one round of insemination, I could purchase my very own variable speed centrifuge. Even better, I found a barely used one on Ebay for almost half that price, and Leland sold me most of the other necessary supplies.
Because of the concentrated nature of the sample after being rinsed and spun, the acidic climate of the vagina was too perilous for these sperm to traverse, and they would need to be directly deposited in my uterus via intrauterine insemination. This procedure entailed an operator savvy with speculums and finding the cervix, and while I myself was such a provider, doing my own insemination would be a logistical nightmare, if not impossibility. As fate would have it, I had trained my partner Liz in the art of speculum exams several months prior when I had an abnormal Pap that she helped me treat naturopathically. So with a brief orientation on the new equipment and sterile technique, she was ready to roll.
All of this might seem like a lot of trouble to some people, but we wanted our technology-enabled conception to also feel intimate and loving, and we knew that could only happen in the privacy of our own home. We also assumed that we would have to make several attempts before getting pregnant and feared the cost would be astronomical if we went through the official channels. Grabbing a cross-country flight when I was ovulating also seemed impractical and expensive, so this plan was best for us.
So by January 2004 we were mentally, emotionally, physically, and logistically as prepared as one can be for conceiving a child. The Overnight Male kits had arrived in Memphis, we had discussed the probable days of ovulation based on my cycle history and schooled Stacey and Warren on when they should or shouldn’t have sex around that time in order to ensure the freshest and most plentiful sperm possible, and we had the FedEx drop-off points and schedule in hand. Now we were just waiting for that egg to pop out, as evidenced by a positive ovulation predictor test. Unfortunately, my prediction was that I would ovulate on a Sunday, the one-day FedEx did not pick-up or deliver packages, except for a small fortune. So we decided to err on the side of an early insemination, as fresh sperm can survive for up to 5 days in the uterus and tubes. After an overnight flight, we knew they wouldn’t last quite that long, but we hoped they’d last a couple of days at least until the egg arrived on the scene. Given that Stacey and Warren had gotten pregnant every time they thought about it with no planning whatsoever, we were banking on him having some super-sperm.
So we went ahead and scheduled for Thursday and Saturday inseminations, trusting that my calculations were accurate. But both days, my morning pee test came up with not-quite-fertile-yet results, indicating that my cycle was running longer than usual. Liz and I were disheartened that all our effort now seemed poorly timed, but told ourselves that it would be good practice anyway. We peeked at a drop of squirming sperm under a mini-microscope I’d bought for fertility purposes, and told the sperm we hoped they’d had a nice flight and how happy we were they survived the journey. We rinsed and spun and rinsed and spun the sperm again per the instructions, drew them up into the tiny catheter that would safely deposit them in my womb, and then had a moment of silence to center ourselves and give the little guys a moment to recover from all that spinning. We lit candles around our room, put on a Tuck and Patti CD, and shared a last look into each other’s eyes full of the enormous importance of what we were about to do.
And then my cervix wasn’t open. I mean it was shut so tight Liz could barely insert the catheter a centimeter into the external opening, another sign our timing was a bit off. Luckily, another midwife friend who does inseminations had told us that if this happened, to deposit the sperm slowly into the fertile mucus coming from the cervix so that they could swim up it into the uterus. So that’s what we did, hoping they would eek their way through.
On Monday morning my ovulation test turned positive, and we prayed that some of those little dudes would hold out for the next 24-36 hours until the egg emerged. But 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14 days later, my pregnancy tests were negative. Remember, I’m a midwife and had access to the tests at work, so I took them compulsively until the two-week mark when it should have been definitive. Then I resigned myself to not being pregnant, and Liz and I started looking at the calendar for our next attempt.
We were very disappointed, but life distracted us from being too down that weekend by throwing the San Francisco gay marriage extravaganza our way. We got married on Monday and had a one-day honeymoon on Tuesday, and were so high on our excitement about the whole thing that we had no time to be sad about not being pregnant. Back at work on Wednesday, my mind couldn’t help but go back there, what with pregnant bellies everywhere I looked. I was now on day 37 of my cycle, and still no period. I attributed this to excess scrutiny and stress around the whole thing and wondered how I would ever get pregnant this way. On several trips to the bathroom, I looked up at the pregnancy tests and resisted reaching up for one, but finally I couldn’t hold back. I told myself that I just needed to see that negative result one more time so I could let it go, and then my body would get back on track.
As I watched, the test line appeared immediately, and then nothing. I waited a couple of minutes and was about to throw the thing away when I saw a second line slowly materialize in the test window. I didn’t trust my eyes because it was so faint, but my coworker and friend Amy took one look at it and confirmed, “It’s positive!” I locked myself in the exam room and called Liz right away. She wasn’t so happy about me taking the test without her, but was thrilled to hear the news. I went home, and we did another test together so she could see the truth for herself. And there we were - married and pregnant in the same week, and in total disbelief about the whole beautiful thing.
As I sit here typing listening to my 10-week-old son Miles cooing at Liz in the other room, I am still in disbelief and wonder if it will ever end. To think that part of this amazing little boy came in a FedEx box is a little too much for even my brain to comprehend. He is such a gift, and I hope one day he understands how much love brought him into this world and how lucky he is to have not only two mommies, but fairy godparents who helped make our wish for him come true.
Saturday, April 3, 2004
Spouses for Life
Spouses for Life
Vanessa Ross
On Monday February 16, 2004, my wife Liz and I were married at San Francisco City Hall, one of the 750 same-sex couples wed that day and the 3700 couples married in the month-long wedding spree. We had no idea we would be standing there exchanging vows and rings and walking out with an official marriage license until two days before it happened. Friday we heard the news that on Thursday, Mayor Gavin Newsom had ordered that the County Clerk change the marriage license application to be gender-neutral so that marriage licenses could be issued to same-sex couples, and that many couples had rushed down to City Hall after hearing it through the grapevine. It was late Friday afternoon, and we assumed we had missed our opportunity. But Saturday, at the gay marriage rally we had already planned to attend in Sacramento, we met two newlyweds who told us that City Hall was staying open through the weekend, and we could still get married. It took us about two seconds to decide to go for it.
A year and a half ago, Liz had surprised me with a diamond ring, asking me to marry her. Having been married (to a man) and divorced just over two years at that point, I was dubious about actually getting married again, but knew that I was ready to commit to a lifelong partnership with Liz. With the caveat that I wasn’t sure about the ceremony part, I accepted her proposal, not knowing exactly what it meant except that we were pledging our love and devotion to each other and our intention to make that last. Besides a level of marriage-phobia that only the divorced can comprehend, my uncertainty stemmed as well from the fact that any wedding we had would be symbolic only, not legally recognized, and that I knew my family was not ready for a lesbian wedding.
But recently I had been thinking more about formalizing our commitment. We were approaching our three-year anniversary and planning to start a family soon. We had been talking about getting matching rings, but didn’t have the money for the kind of rings we wanted at the moment. Then came the Massachusetts court decision in favor of gay marriage, and I asked Liz if we should go there to get married when it became legal in May. We were mulling this prospect over probably right around the time Mayor Newsom was sitting at Bush’s State of the Union address, feeling so offended by our President’s rhetoric of discrimination against gays and lesbians that he began formulating his own plan to make gay marriage happen in San Francisco.
For those of you who don’t know, Mayor Newsom is a straight, white, Catholic, married, moderate Democrat who was just elected last year. He does not have a history of the kind of radical idealism he has displayed in this case, citing the California Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law to all citizens as the legal justification for his actions allowing gay marriage. He did so in spite of the “Defense of Marriage Act” passed two years ago, a law defining marriage as between a man and a woman, the constitutionality of which will now be tested. I’m sure he’s hoping that ultimately the issue will go his way and he will gain politically - this man definitely has aspirations beyond San Francisco – but regardless, he took a major personal and professional risk to do the right thing, and that is a rare thing in politics these days.
That the State of the Union provided the genesis for Newsom’s actions couldn’t make me happier. I have never felt so offended as the evening I stood in my kitchen washing dishes as I listened to Bush talk about the sanctity of the family and how the will of the “people” must prevail; translation: my family is not sacred, and I am not one of the people whose rights matter. Even though I vote and pay the same taxes as any straight person, am a law-abiding citizen who spends every day helping other people, I am somehow less deserving of the 1,049 rights afforded to married couples under the law because my partner is a woman. Having gone from belonging to the category of people who are given this privilege, despite the fact that I was pretty confused at the time and in a state of denial about my sexuality, to being one of the minority who are denied it, I can only say that my change of status feels completely arbitrary to me. What is different about me in my current relationship is that I am happier, clearer, unconfused, and feel freer because I am not carrying around the weight of my previous internal and external deceptions. I am living more honestly and am a better person for it, able to cultivate a truly authentic, loving, committed life with my partner. If anything, these factors make this relationship more sacred to me than my first marriage, which only because it was with a man, received the blessing of our society. What could be more arbitrary than that?
So when we heard the cattle call for same-sex couples to come get married at City Hall, we joyfully threw ourselves into the stampede of queers clamoring to tie the knot before someone told us, again, we could not. We got all gussied up and made it down to San Francisco at 9 o’clock Sunday morning, only to find the line already stretching three-quarters of the way around the building. After only an hour, we were told we would not make it in that day and to come back the next day, President’s Day, when weddings would be performed on a first-come, first-served basis. Knowing that Tuesday, when the courts reopened, the anti-gay-marriage folks would be there bright and early to try to stop the love parade, we couldn’t risk missing the opportunity and quickly rearranged our schedules to be off work the next day. This meant I had to be on-call that night (Sunday) for the midwife covering for me the next day. So we went home, went to bed early, and Liz got up at 2 a.m. to go hold our place in line in the cold and rain, along with hundreds of other couples who stayed there all night long. When I got off-call and got down there at 8 a.m. to meet her, the line already stretched around the building again. It was cold and everyone was wet, but no one was complaining. The mood was jubilant, couples cuddled under their umbrellas or makeshift shelters, and everyone was smiling. Volunteers who had been married in the days prior walked the lines with hot coffee, juice, fresh Krispy Kreme donuts, bagels, cookies, gum, water, garbage bags to protect your marriage license from the rain, “Freedom to Marry” stickers, and encouraging words. Every major news agency was there to capture the moment, and at one point a group of Japanese tourists joined in with the paparazzi, clicking off shots of the authentic San Francisco scene.
The long lines continued once inside City Hall as we were guided through a well-organized wedding machine staffed by incredibly friendly city employees who were volunteering their time to be part of this effort, and clearly enjoying every minute of it. The most time-consuming activity was going through the multiple steps of filling out the application for the marriage license and having our written information checked by three different people, then checking it on the computer screen (the only thing that hadn’t been made gender-neutral: Liz was the “Bride” and I was the “Groom”), then swearing that our information was true. We finally were wed at around 1:30 p.m. on one of the balconies of the rotunda, with probably twenty other weddings going on simultaneously in different niches around the huge room. We were married by a lovely man name Jimmer, a city employee who had been drafted to officiate weddings after being married himself to his partner of twenty-something years a few days before. As witnesses we had my good friend Jenna’s mother and her partner of ten years, Wendy, who got married just before us, along with a documentary film crew that had been following us around. Once the moment finally came, we were so overwhelmed that we missed our cues to place our mall-bought sterling silver bands on each other’s fingers at the appropriate moment, but we just laughed, put them on, and let Jimmer pronounce us “Spouses for Life” again. The ceremony was over before we knew it, and we were back in line to wait for our completed, official marriage license. Getting that piece of paper and then walking out with it to a cheering throng of well-wishers and press on the steps of City Hall was an unexpected thrill I will never forget.
So it wasn’t the beautiful, well-planned ceremony surrounded by family and friends we would have envisioned for ourselves, but our wedding was an amazing experience we wouldn’t change for the world. We got to celebrate our love and formalize our commitment to one another while being part of an historic moment in a struggle for freedom and equality, surrounded by the powerful energy of hundreds of other couples doing the same. I cannot see how anyone who witnessed this pure demonstration of love and the simple desire for our families to be recognized could maintain that there is anything dangerous or wrong about it.
Anyone who would like to join the fight against the proposed federal amendment to ban gay marriage that would constitutionalize discrimination for the first time in our nation’s history can log onto the Human Rights Commission website, www.hrc.org.
Vanessa Ross
On Monday February 16, 2004, my wife Liz and I were married at San Francisco City Hall, one of the 750 same-sex couples wed that day and the 3700 couples married in the month-long wedding spree. We had no idea we would be standing there exchanging vows and rings and walking out with an official marriage license until two days before it happened. Friday we heard the news that on Thursday, Mayor Gavin Newsom had ordered that the County Clerk change the marriage license application to be gender-neutral so that marriage licenses could be issued to same-sex couples, and that many couples had rushed down to City Hall after hearing it through the grapevine. It was late Friday afternoon, and we assumed we had missed our opportunity. But Saturday, at the gay marriage rally we had already planned to attend in Sacramento, we met two newlyweds who told us that City Hall was staying open through the weekend, and we could still get married. It took us about two seconds to decide to go for it.
A year and a half ago, Liz had surprised me with a diamond ring, asking me to marry her. Having been married (to a man) and divorced just over two years at that point, I was dubious about actually getting married again, but knew that I was ready to commit to a lifelong partnership with Liz. With the caveat that I wasn’t sure about the ceremony part, I accepted her proposal, not knowing exactly what it meant except that we were pledging our love and devotion to each other and our intention to make that last. Besides a level of marriage-phobia that only the divorced can comprehend, my uncertainty stemmed as well from the fact that any wedding we had would be symbolic only, not legally recognized, and that I knew my family was not ready for a lesbian wedding.
But recently I had been thinking more about formalizing our commitment. We were approaching our three-year anniversary and planning to start a family soon. We had been talking about getting matching rings, but didn’t have the money for the kind of rings we wanted at the moment. Then came the Massachusetts court decision in favor of gay marriage, and I asked Liz if we should go there to get married when it became legal in May. We were mulling this prospect over probably right around the time Mayor Newsom was sitting at Bush’s State of the Union address, feeling so offended by our President’s rhetoric of discrimination against gays and lesbians that he began formulating his own plan to make gay marriage happen in San Francisco.
For those of you who don’t know, Mayor Newsom is a straight, white, Catholic, married, moderate Democrat who was just elected last year. He does not have a history of the kind of radical idealism he has displayed in this case, citing the California Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law to all citizens as the legal justification for his actions allowing gay marriage. He did so in spite of the “Defense of Marriage Act” passed two years ago, a law defining marriage as between a man and a woman, the constitutionality of which will now be tested. I’m sure he’s hoping that ultimately the issue will go his way and he will gain politically - this man definitely has aspirations beyond San Francisco – but regardless, he took a major personal and professional risk to do the right thing, and that is a rare thing in politics these days.
That the State of the Union provided the genesis for Newsom’s actions couldn’t make me happier. I have never felt so offended as the evening I stood in my kitchen washing dishes as I listened to Bush talk about the sanctity of the family and how the will of the “people” must prevail; translation: my family is not sacred, and I am not one of the people whose rights matter. Even though I vote and pay the same taxes as any straight person, am a law-abiding citizen who spends every day helping other people, I am somehow less deserving of the 1,049 rights afforded to married couples under the law because my partner is a woman. Having gone from belonging to the category of people who are given this privilege, despite the fact that I was pretty confused at the time and in a state of denial about my sexuality, to being one of the minority who are denied it, I can only say that my change of status feels completely arbitrary to me. What is different about me in my current relationship is that I am happier, clearer, unconfused, and feel freer because I am not carrying around the weight of my previous internal and external deceptions. I am living more honestly and am a better person for it, able to cultivate a truly authentic, loving, committed life with my partner. If anything, these factors make this relationship more sacred to me than my first marriage, which only because it was with a man, received the blessing of our society. What could be more arbitrary than that?
So when we heard the cattle call for same-sex couples to come get married at City Hall, we joyfully threw ourselves into the stampede of queers clamoring to tie the knot before someone told us, again, we could not. We got all gussied up and made it down to San Francisco at 9 o’clock Sunday morning, only to find the line already stretching three-quarters of the way around the building. After only an hour, we were told we would not make it in that day and to come back the next day, President’s Day, when weddings would be performed on a first-come, first-served basis. Knowing that Tuesday, when the courts reopened, the anti-gay-marriage folks would be there bright and early to try to stop the love parade, we couldn’t risk missing the opportunity and quickly rearranged our schedules to be off work the next day. This meant I had to be on-call that night (Sunday) for the midwife covering for me the next day. So we went home, went to bed early, and Liz got up at 2 a.m. to go hold our place in line in the cold and rain, along with hundreds of other couples who stayed there all night long. When I got off-call and got down there at 8 a.m. to meet her, the line already stretched around the building again. It was cold and everyone was wet, but no one was complaining. The mood was jubilant, couples cuddled under their umbrellas or makeshift shelters, and everyone was smiling. Volunteers who had been married in the days prior walked the lines with hot coffee, juice, fresh Krispy Kreme donuts, bagels, cookies, gum, water, garbage bags to protect your marriage license from the rain, “Freedom to Marry” stickers, and encouraging words. Every major news agency was there to capture the moment, and at one point a group of Japanese tourists joined in with the paparazzi, clicking off shots of the authentic San Francisco scene.
The long lines continued once inside City Hall as we were guided through a well-organized wedding machine staffed by incredibly friendly city employees who were volunteering their time to be part of this effort, and clearly enjoying every minute of it. The most time-consuming activity was going through the multiple steps of filling out the application for the marriage license and having our written information checked by three different people, then checking it on the computer screen (the only thing that hadn’t been made gender-neutral: Liz was the “Bride” and I was the “Groom”), then swearing that our information was true. We finally were wed at around 1:30 p.m. on one of the balconies of the rotunda, with probably twenty other weddings going on simultaneously in different niches around the huge room. We were married by a lovely man name Jimmer, a city employee who had been drafted to officiate weddings after being married himself to his partner of twenty-something years a few days before. As witnesses we had my good friend Jenna’s mother and her partner of ten years, Wendy, who got married just before us, along with a documentary film crew that had been following us around. Once the moment finally came, we were so overwhelmed that we missed our cues to place our mall-bought sterling silver bands on each other’s fingers at the appropriate moment, but we just laughed, put them on, and let Jimmer pronounce us “Spouses for Life” again. The ceremony was over before we knew it, and we were back in line to wait for our completed, official marriage license. Getting that piece of paper and then walking out with it to a cheering throng of well-wishers and press on the steps of City Hall was an unexpected thrill I will never forget.
So it wasn’t the beautiful, well-planned ceremony surrounded by family and friends we would have envisioned for ourselves, but our wedding was an amazing experience we wouldn’t change for the world. We got to celebrate our love and formalize our commitment to one another while being part of an historic moment in a struggle for freedom and equality, surrounded by the powerful energy of hundreds of other couples doing the same. I cannot see how anyone who witnessed this pure demonstration of love and the simple desire for our families to be recognized could maintain that there is anything dangerous or wrong about it.
Anyone who would like to join the fight against the proposed federal amendment to ban gay marriage that would constitutionalize discrimination for the first time in our nation’s history can log onto the Human Rights Commission website, www.hrc.org.
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